Blood , Bone & Lineage
Yaradana hizmetim, Yaradandan ötürü.
I am in service to The Creation, because of The Creator.
Time stood still. And tested everything I had.
Between two eclipses, my father , Hayri Tezveren Baba flew to the Heavens.
Today marks 20th day of his passage into the other, the Bardo ; that in-between veil so many lineages hold regard of, the 40 day passage when a Soul is said to linger between worlds before it is fully released into what's next. Naturally, so many mixed emotions are moving through in me since choosing to embark on this journey to care take for him in his last days/weeks… Honor & humility braided with intimidation. Confusion with grief. Love with heartbreak. Both are true. Both / and …
It is rarely ever “either-or” consciousness and almost always “ both-and ” for me in this vast reality of humanness. Indeed, this being human comes with such great irony ; such magnificence and patheticness at once, such light and darkness at once, reflecting our essence of love and the illusion of shame , all at once..One thing I keep learning is that What we do not Own, Owns us …
So I am here to share the gifts, alongside the great challenges, of this journey with my Baba, my Tezveren lineage and blood. Thus far…
(If you'd like to read more of previous reflections leading up to the tribute for Hayri baba, you can find it on my Substack and on the Temple blog)
The longest ceremony of my life …
This has been by far the greatest initiation of my life, on a whole other level to hold space and guardianship, to be with dying and death which is my own father at last… As days emerged into nights, weeks folded into moments, like one long day that never truly ended. The longest ceremony I have ever held. Teachings arriving at a fascinating speed and slow like honey all at the same time, as wind and mind and soul moving together. It has been rewarding, humbling, overwhelming, honoring, challenging, terrifying, soul-opening, and exhausting, all at once.
To assist my Baba through this transition, to watch him slowly decay physically and mentally, has been an era of emotions I had never felt before. Each day has demanded a deeper presence than I didn't know I could hold, and some days it has been hard to keep up. Watching him walk more and more into stasis, eating less, then to none. Constantly speaking from his bardo state between worlds to his deceased friends, to his guides, to different timelines. And most entertainingly, back into the era of his life when he was young: a successful entrepreneur and leather shoe designer, Hayri Kundura, making his business deals, making sure again and again that he had no more debt to pay. To his last breath, making sure there was no more debt.
All of those realities were entirely true and real to him. Just as the visions we meet in ceremony are so true to us. They reminded me once again and again that we are such multidimensional beings that create multitude of realities.
To witness him lose his memory, in moments of not recognizing me, my name or my sister, not knowing where he was in his own home , to watch dementia file the edges of his mind into a little, innocent child, and to watch myself shift from the archetype of the child into the archetype of the mother, the caregiver has shaped my soul in ways I know I am still only beginning to understand. As I feel the tenderness of how vast a human being is, and how small. How helpless, and how expansive. Both-and…
It has been fascinating to see the correspondence between death and the plant medicine spaces I have devoted myself to for over a decade & the parallels in how the consciousness moves between worlds. How the visions, ancestors, and visitors arrive, how the mind's own projective power shapes the realities of what we experience. It makes you wonder whether we are always creating our own reality, all at once, or Both-and in collaboration with the our over Soul and Creators divine plan. So many parallel universes, so many parallel realities, happening all at once. With the help of so many mystical wisdom traditions, we know that human beings are so much more than human beings. We know that we contain the vastness of the cosmos within us, and the upper realms and the underworld, ultimately are no different from one another.
The words that echo the most…
“Diyar ve Diğer” he called it , this realm and the other : meaning he was in between, the other side of the veil and this one. The bardo.
"I am a hundred years old, and I am already dead. When are they going to come and get me? Where is the vehicle for the deceased? Aren't they supposed to come for me? Isn't it my turn yet? Will you please help me take my life? "
These words rang out nearly every day, to anyone who came near him, especially to my sister and I , in each waking moment. This was the tone of his bardo, even before his body had fully let go: complete, and yet still holding to his control, his anger, to his unforgiveness. What is our right to ask to let go, be taken and what is our right to hold on to the very last moment, in whatever form the Creator's timing takes? It makes you question the dignity of a human life.
For years before this, he had told my sisters and I that if he ever became this dependent, he wanted us to help him pass to assist him in euthanasia. Euthanasia is not legal in Turkey; it was never something we could offer him. And yet somehow, in his mind, he had come to believe it was owed to him from what he had researched over the years. Each time he woke up, he would ask us to help take his life , like a child mid-tantrum, the only consistent mantra in his world. We didn't always know how to hold this kind of death psychology. In his purges of anger, the theme was always the same: he was certain he was already dead, that the vehicle meant to collect him, the machine meant to end his life, simply hadn't arrived yet.
My older middle sister and I kept rotating 24 hr shifts, trying to make this passage as painless for him as we possibly could, so that he wouldn't break a bone and would pass in his home rather than a hospital or care home. In that, at least, we completed this stage in the most painless way we knew how to give him, and as he most desired , passing in his home, in his bed, with my middle sister by his side.
Death psychology has become one of the most fascinating thresholds of my life…
It was so fascinating, and tender, to watch how naked a person can become. This was my Baba's greatest fear for nearly thirty years: becoming someone who needed to be fed, changed, cared for like a baby, losing the sharp mind and the strong memory he was so proud of. He took care of himself, almost entirely alone, he lived and loved the pleasures of life with more youthfulness than I felt in myself most times until he was eighty-eight yrs old and until stage-four cancer moved from his colon into his lungs and spread everywhere.
There were indeed moments of gratitude and open-heartedness in these months, but often, beneath his fierce independence, I could see how much of his inner landscape had been shaped by what he had been over a lifetime. He would fall asleep and wake multiple times a day, each waking bringing a different emotion, purging a different reality: paranoia, anger, confusion, mistrust, and sometimes a deep shame, with old scenarios playing again and again on loop. Holding so much reverence, love, sincerity and courage in one heart, alongside the shadow of patriarchy of fear, manipulation, narcissistic abuse and witnessing all of it purging at once, has brought a very deep clarity.
Both and…
Gifts of love and the shadow …
A Revolutionary Act of Ending..
Hayri Baba chose to go in a way that was, in my opinion, a revolutionary act. A rebel he was at soul, challenging many systems of belief, and much of the consciousness of the lineage he himself tended in our Tezveren Dede Türbe, our temple. In the line of Islam, and in the lineage of Tezveren Dede, when a person passes they are meant to be buried through Muslim ritual and mostly Arabic prayer though Arabic is not our original Turkic language. A selâ is called out to announce the dead and the burial of the deceased, and the whole village, family, and friends gather to carry the cenaze, the body, to its resting place together. However, Hayri Baba, as caretaker of the temple for so many years, had seen both the blessing and the shadow of these rituals and gatherings over his lifetime ; the places where, beneath the honoring, sincerity can quietly go missing, where ritual can slip into performance, ego, or show rather than a sincere goodbye held in the heart. As much as he cared for the lineage of Tezveren Dede, he never fully resonated with foreign prayers spoken in a language that was not his own heart's first language. He also believed deeply in science and modern medicine ; in their gifts and in their difficulties both.
So he chose to offer his body to be studied in the anatomy department at Uludağ University, an extraordinarily rare choice within our lineage and ancestry. In Türkiye, so few bodies are donated for study that importing them can cost the equivalent of millions of dollars. His choice was a quiet, radical shift ; a rebellion made of love, in a lineage that doesn't always know another way to think about death. He trusted that whoever held a truly sincere prayer in their heart would still be welcome to offer it, in a close circle, without performance. Sincerity was one of his greatest values. He chose to be of service to humanity in the way he knew best, and to make clear that no ritual should be performed only for show. Only those who carried the torch of sincere love & respect for his life needed to gather. That alone was a shake in the consciousness in our little town. The curiosity and the questioning it brings is, in my opinion, the kind of ripple in the consciousness he left as his legacy.
Like the times I have witnessed him often say that it doesn't matter whether a woman covers her head going into the temple, as most muslim temples require. What matters is that your heart isn't covered to the Creator. Covering the head is only a show if your heart is not open and you ask from the heart, that is what the Creator really cares about. And if anyone challenged that from within their dogmatic beliefs, he would challenge them right back to pose the question, confront them, no shyness. Looking at his three daughters , despite all the patriarchy, the freedom he gave all of us to be ourselves in our expression, I hold deep respect & gratitude for that.
The cords of emotional abuse needed to be released..
There were stretches when none of us knew if this would last months or end at any moment and in the deep exhaustion of that unknowing, in a moment that called for more of a loving compassionate team than I could feel around me,
I recognized the same unhealthy patriarchal mindset pattern surfacing again between my sister and I. Alongside the beautiful values of my father's lineage, the patriarch's finer qualities, there has also lived a shadow: ridicule, arrogance, talking down, irritation, resentment, and a hatred aimed, too often, at women. Emotional and narcissistic abuse that cannot continue. It needed to be dissolved with him and I knew I needed to be the last link in the chain.
After being with him nearly around the clock for close to fifty days, on the morning of August 17th, after so many days of watching him struggle with his own desire to go, a deep cord-cutting prayer was released, as I took what I call my sacred absence releasing him into my sister's care for however long remained, as i stayed close by and releasing myself from continuing to carry a lineage of abuse. Baba flew to the Heavens that same evening.
All of it keeps pointing back to the same place: this is an inner job & we are the ones who must make the change. If we want something different, we cannot keep looking out there for it. The world we wish to create is made here, in ourselves and I know that comes with great responsibility.
There have been many moments in my life when I played into this. First toward myself, and then in my own intimate relationships, in the ways I reacted instead of responded. I continued the culture of abuse too.
So the responsibility is to look at myself. To tend the places in me where I still hold separation, abuse, and control, so that I no longer participate in it. The finger points to oneself, rather than to the blaming of others. It takes practice, and it is not always easy, but this is the way the new world is made that we want to be part of.
The ungoing battles and the wars on our eath always point outside ; to which leader, to which system brought this upon us when everything is truly within.
The wars we create, and the peace we all so desperately long for.
That is what I choose to devote my life to.
What baba has truly gifted..
His greatest gift to us, and to this world, was an undeniable, unapologetic presence of freedom. It is a controversial thing to say, because the very control he sometimes held over us is the mirror image of the freedom he ultimately gave his three daughters. He had great difficulty loving women, beginning with his own mother, and that difficulty showed up at times as abuse and disrespect toward the women in his life alongside real beauty, and a real honoring of a woman's freedom. Held together. Both true. Both-and.
In the small village where he grew up, a place that knew little beyond control and religion, a place built to keep people small, he still found a way to let his three daughters travel, live abroad, and build our own lives across timelines.
I can speak for myself: he let me build a lineage rooted in freedom, and most times, he saw me for who I truly am. That is the greatest gift of all, and I will cherish it forever.
"Nature is my religion," he would often say. A couple of birthdays ago, he gave me something I will carry forever: the name Toprak ; soil, earth - in recognition of my two-spirit nature as both his son and his daughter, and of the deep connection to nature we shared. He had thought about it for a long time. And later, when his memory began to leave him and he forgot my given name, he still called me Toprak. So on my 45th birthday, I reclaim it.
His gift, and a memory. Thank you, Baba, for gifting me my life, for breathing me into being. In this portal of the Bardo of your passing, I find myself holding the torch of the values you lit in me: sincerity, discipline, courage, the willingness to confront, a wide and generous sense of humor and a love of Nature that was vast.
My vow now is to pause and breathe. Creator, divine intelligence, help me move through this passage with an open heart. Help me remember that even when it feels like more than my heart can hold, my heart has an immense capacity to open. Let me ask for help, and let spirit be the guide. May we know ourselves, and our reason for being here for sharing the medicine that we are. Help our hearts heal from these ancestral wounds, and help us receive our ancestral gifts, alchemized into beauty. I love you. I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.
A window into his voice
I've shared a short video below — in Turkish only — so you can feel something of my father's essence and hear him speak about the Tezveren Dede teachings in his own way. I'll be working on a translation for a documentary in the months ahead. For now, this is simply so you can sense him. In the meantime, there are wonderful AI tools that may help with translation until I get to it.
May the radiant essence of his soul be remembered always. May it live on in the smile of everyone who ever felt his true essence.
Thank you for your life. Thank you for my life.
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